As author of the "old version" I find that your version is too verbose in order to describe the functional paradigm. My article concentrated on the functional paradigm and let the features that come along with it (higher order functions, purity, laziness) in separate articles. I find an overview article such as yours important, but we should find a better way to let atomic and overview articles to coexist. I do not consider my article being old.
Can we move your article to "Functional programming overview" and mine back to "Functional programming" ? Lemming 16:08, 18 January 2008 (UTC)

I agree that the new version is quite verbose, but it also makes several important points that the old version doesn't. One important point is that functional programming is a style of programming and that even some imperative languages support it. You insist that the article should be shorter, but after looking at it again I think that short paragraphs describing all common features of FP are necessary. You might want to write separate articles that describe them in detail, but the short descriptions should be kept anyway. I don't believe that displaying the same information information in several places on the wiki is a bad thing, especially if they are linked together by hyperrefs.

I decided to write it from scratch because I didn't like taking assembly language as an example of an imperative language and because I wanted to structure it in a different way. Your article indeed isn't 'old', I refer to it in that way only because it is older than the current one.

I wouldn't like to replace the article back with your version nor to make it considerably shorter, however if you have any more specific ideas how to improve it, feel free to do it.
MichalPalka 10:02, 23 January 2008 (UTC)